Google Maps is undoubtedly one of the best ways to get precise directions or just to get an idea of where you’re headed. It isn’t just useful on a mobile devices, and might very well be used just as much on desktops. Quick Maps is a Chrome extension and Firefox add-on for Google Maps that can display the map for any location within a webpage. The map opens as a pop-up in the same tab, and allows you to pan around or zoom in/out of the location. The extension will either automatically detect an address on a webpage and show the map for it when you position your cursor over it (seems to depend on how an address is written), or you can manually open the pop-up by selecting the address and sending it to the extension from the right click context menu.

Once installed, select an address on any website, right-click it and select Search with Quick Maps from the context menu. A pop-up will open with the location pinpointed. When you’re done, click the small close button at the top right to close the pop up window.

Similar extensions that we’ve covered are Handy Maps that allow you to get directions to any place from your current location and MapMe, which does essentially the same thing as this extension, but shows results in a new tab. If you compare the two we’ve reviewed before with Quick Maps, then Quick Maps appears to be more convenient. Handy Maps is perhaps in a league of its own since the functionality is somewhat different than that of MapMe and Quick Maps, but Quick Maps wins out because it is faster and does not force you to navigate away from the page you’re on.

The extension also has a search bar integrated in the popup in case you want to edit a part of the address. Note that if the address does not have the name of the country, state, city that you want to search, a simple street address will not give you accurate results. This is logical since a name may belong to several places. A reasonable workaround would be for the developer to add a location detection feature that will detect where a user is searching from and customize the results to match accordingly. The feature should be optional since not all searches will be made for your local area. You can install the extension by hitting up the link below.

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neuromatico

Nice, but redundant if you’re using Chrome, although the baked-in method admittedly requires 2 clicks. Just highlight the address, right click and select “search Google for…”. The resulting page will display a large thumbnail map at the top; clicking on it will open Google maps.